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Monday, September 15, 2008

Guilty Pleasures

I learned something about myself over the weekend. I've become lazy as I've aged. I recently switched my cable from Dish Satellite to AT&T's new U-Verse. Saturday, they came to install the new service so I had my satellite disconnected as of the same day. From the time I got out of bed Saturday (6:30 AM), I had no TV - not even local channels since there is not a TV in my house hooked up to the antenna. Since there was nothing to watch on TV, I was forced to clean the rest of my house that didn't get straightened by my mother on Friday. It was the only alternative to sitting in silence, bored out of my mind, waiting on the cable guy. Over the past week, I've been sick, so I haven't had a whole lot of energy - which was also the case on Saturday morning. After making myself breakfast, doing the dishes, and 1 load of laundry, I decided to get out the carpet cleaner and clean the carpet upstairs (Bella, my dog, had gotten sick and made a slight mess). I started where the stain was and after about 12 strokes of vacuuming with the carpet cleaner, I was done for. All I wanted to do was watch TV - and I had no TV to watch. I proceeded to go downstairs and write a blog about the new decor my mother had helped me with the night before, when my internet went out. Perfect - the AT&T man was coming anyway. After 5 hours of install and patient waiting, the cable guy informs me that due to the hurricane in TX, there is an outage to the STL area with no anticipated outage time. Great...now what? I was without cable until 7 PM last night. Tony and I were about to go insane...no TV, no internet. What were we to do? It would be to logical to pick up a book and read that, or to do something constructive. We have officially become couch potatoes. I don't typically watch a whole lot of TV anyway, but I watch a TON of movies. Unfortunately, all the movies we own, we have seen millions of times and we had just watched most of them recently. The more I thought about how TV dependent we were the more annoyed I got. I made a punch list of things that need to be done around the house, items that should be done weekly, and a punch list of things that I want to do in the near future. From now on, we are going to start doing one item a night/weekend before we resort to comfy clothes, comfort food, and a waste of an evening watching the "boob tube" as my father refers to it.

Which brings me to another issue. I've put on quite a bit of weight in the last couple of months/year. I went from 130 to 160 in less than a year. Why? Probably because I've been spending too many hours in front of that illuminated box in my living room eating bonbons and popcorn. And it doesn't help that I haven't been very active - I have no exercise in my agenda at all. I have a gym membership that I don't use and exert very little energy in a days work. My daily punch list should include EXERCISE in it, but unfortunately, I couldn't bring myself to add that entity. I hate exercise, I don't like feeling winded, and I hate sweating. However, I had to put an item on my punch list that gave me some activity in my sedentary lifestyle...so in denial that I needed this, I decided that Bella has put on some weight and needs some activity as well. My punch list item is to walk the dog at least every other day. Sorry Bella...